No one knows for sure, but figures released Thursday provide some tantalizing clues.

More Silicon Valley homes changed hands last month than in March 2008; it was the fourth consecutive month the county’s sales have outpaced their prior-year levels. And after months of big declines, the median price of the houses sold hovered in the low $400,000s for a third month in a row.

“What we are seeing is signs you would expect to see prior to prices leveling off,” said Andrew LePage of MDA DataQuick, a real estate information firm that released March Bay Area home sales figures Thursday. However, “given all the different countercurrents and all the uncertainty out there, you don’t want to point to three months and say, ‘Ah, we’ve hit bottom.’ “

Although Pralay sent this in a week ago, I figured I’d post it today so that people could spend some more time reflecting on this news, before commenting on it.

Personally, I know from the NAR radio ad (the guy digging, who hits a sprinkler) that you can’t find the bottom. It’s impossible.

But still, this is great news. Now, I might have been too optimistic last year with my predictions, but would I be so off to say that we can expect a healthy 9% YoY appreciationg in 2010? Then back to 15% by 2012 when green tech is in full swing?

“Is Real Estater sleeping?”
Is Real Estater sleeping?
No one knows for sure, but lack of early morning postings provide some tantalizing clues.

“What we are seeing is signs you would expect to see prior to Real Estater waking up”, said Andrew LePage of MDA DataQuick, a real estate information firm that released March Bay Area home sales figures Thursday. However, “given his propense to claim attendance to multi-time zone conference call, you don’t want to point to 10am and say, ‘Ah, he was sleeping and just woke up.'”

All the sellers on the sidelines who read this type of news and think, “Maybe I’ll finally put my house on the market – and I’ll actually be able to get bids over asking and get the [wishing] price I want!”.

And so many of them do this, they totally flood the market with supply, and that results in some HUGE price drops.

Oh good lord, it looked OK in the preview that time. I’m an ignoramus.

HERE’S THE LAME JOKE – it’s not even a joke, it’s just an image I wanted to go with my ‘heh heh heh’ from above, and now it’s not even slightly funny, I just want to see it in print so I can have closure:

#16/18 – Ooooo – I don’t know, I think RE got a good little zinger in here! He’s right – plenty of readers of this blog wait for him to chime in with grist for their mill, or speculate on what it means when he doesn’t comment. Hey, it’s par for the troll-course.

#14 – The use of median price is so very misleading so often. The thing that galls me is how the NAR/CAR wouldn’t hesitate to trumpet a RISE in the median values, and use that as their baseline number for how house prices were increasing. It’s what everyone would refer to. Still is.

But suddenly, when there’s a decrease, it’s “overly influenced by the low-end foreclosures”.

It’s actually just a dumb statistic, and contrary to an old saying, statistics don’t lie – they’re just wildly abused and misinterpreted (often deliberately).

The median is the median. It is what it is. A change in the median does NOT mean a change in the value of all houses.

Now obviously when it goes way up or way down it means SOMETHING – but what?

.
Have any of you heard the new CAR commercial on the radio? The one where “California” is talking like Dirty Harry and starts out “you want a piece of me?” It’s more like a mafia guy’s words coming out of Clint Eastwood’s mouth. Odd.

My interpretation of a rise in the median home price is good and that although there are many forclosures and REO properties selling, home values are begining to trend upwards. The median gives you a good perspective of where the whole market is trending towards. It would be interesting to find out what the previous monthly median and average sales prices were so you could see what the skew looks like and could have a better perspective on this upwards trend.

Did you mean IF you saw the median go up, you would conclude this, or did you mean – you already conclude this right now.
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Oh, Lewis! Didn’t you see how words are carefully crafted in #23 so that it talks about only “upwards trend”? He also declared his own “interpretation of a rise in the median home price is good“. He left the interpretation open for downward trend.

If there is any downward trend it will be interpreted as “mix of properties”.

When the last housing bubble bust in the late 80’s, it took a good 6-7 yrs for the market to bottom.

When the last Nasdaq bubble bust, oh well… we are still at the bottom after 9 yrs.

So, why will this housing bubble, which was far bigger than any others we witnessed, bottom just in 2-3 yrs?

And remember, when the last housing bubble bust bottomed around 94-95, we had a monstrous transformative technology trend (called Internet) that created a couple of hundred very well paid jobs in the bay area. That helped stop the housing slump that lasted 6-7 yrs.

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